Boris and Donald's Wrecking Ball - Foreign Policy - 0 views
foreignpolicy.com/...s-wrecking-ball-prime-minister
UK Britain US USA globalization nationalism politics analysis EU Brexit conservatism trade
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Johnson and Trump spring from the same breeding ground of middle-class, anti-globalist rage (politically, that is; personally both men come from wealthy families). They are brothers in demagoguery who have expediently kicked aside old-style conservatism and replaced it with a virulent brand of neonationalism
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like so many demagogues before them, Trump and Johnson are making reckless promises they can’t keep
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Both men are adept at conjuring the illusion that they can somehow take their countries backward in time—to restore them to their former glory, the theory goes—while the rest of the world meekly goes along with them. In fact, the rest of the world is doing nothing of the sort: It has already moved on, forging its own trade deals without the United States and Britain
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polls show Britons are cooling to Brexit and are coming to realize that the ultimate irony of the slogan Johnson and other Leavers deployed during the Brexit campaign—“Take Back Control”—is that Britain has relinquished even more control to Brussels.
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Just as Trump pretended he was giving the American people a better NAFTA deal (which now has little chance of congressional passage) and pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which had been the single most effective means of forcing China to behave better on trade and intellectual property rights—to show that he could do it better alone (he hasn’t), Johnson will take his nation through a similar charade. Egged on by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party—which will threaten him with more Tory defections if he doesn’t keep his word—Johnson will continue to pretend to the British people that they can get better trade deals on their own, when most of the evidence is that instead he will bequeath to them international isolation, ever-rising prices, and permanent economic eclipse. And perhaps the eclipse of the Conservative Party as well.
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“Trump will use his relationship to try to get the U.K. to change its views on the Iran nuclear deal,” said Heather Conley of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Until now, the U.K. has stood with France and Germany in seeking to rescue the 2015 nuclear pact that Trump rejected last year; if it sides with the United States now, that in turn could create more fissures in the trans-Atlantic alliance.
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Trump is plainly eager to have Johnson as an ally in his great task of unmaking the international system
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we will all be witnessing a bizarre backward version of the so-called special relationship, one premised on undoing a great deal of what the U.K. and the United States accomplished together after World War II, when both nations oversaw the creation of postwar institutions such as the United Nations and Bretton Woods; British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin took the lead in creating NATO (even as an exhausted U.K. bequeathed to the United States the role of stabilizer of the West); and the United States and Britain were the primary progenitors of the global free-trading system
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It is true that the rise of both Johnson and Trump was a response to a real need for redress in the U.S. and U.K.-conceived international system. Go-it-alone nationalism did not come out of nowhere; both countries staked everything on globalization and free trade—particularly in the financial sector—and the middle class in both the United States and Britain had suffered from it. Indeed, Britain did even worse than the United States after the 2008 crash, and the Brussels bureaucracy had grown irritatingly intrusive. It’s probably surprising that it took this long for a backlash like Brexit to occur. But pointing out serious flaws in the system is not an argument for junking it altogether. And that’s where the new special relationship may be headed for trouble.